David Laska: Broken Promises Doom Obama

Tomorrow is Election Day. All the negative TV ads, Get Out the Vote calls, gaffe-spotting and fundraising solicitations will finally come to an end.

On second thought, the fundraising solicitations probably won’t stop.

There’s a chance that Obama will pull off a squeaker tomorrow, but it’s not high. In all likelihood, Mitt Romney will be the 45th President of the United States.

The reason is simple: Barack Obama’s reelection bid has been doomed by his own broken promises.

Obama built his 2008 campaign on a false premise: that a man with no leadership experience whatsoever could change the way America is governed.

When the same man, who has never run a business and spent a negligible amount of his adult life working for a profit-making enterprise, told us that his stimulus package would keep unemployment below 8 percent, we should not have believed him.

We did (some of us, anyway), and for our faith we received $800 billion more of debt and 43 consecutive months of unemployment above 8 percent.

With a record of spending like that, it’s no surprise that Obama’s promise to cut the deficit “in half by the end of my first term” also fell by the wayside as the deficit ballooned from $500 billion in 2008 to nearly $1.5 trillion this year.

Obama promised to present a plan for immigration reform during his first term in office. Four year later, we’re still waiting. Meanwhile, a drug and gun war rages on our southern border and the human tragedy of illegal immigration carries on unabated.

During the 2008 campaign, Obama repeatedly promised to close Guantanamo Bay. On January 22, 2009, two days after his swearing in, he signed an executive order mandating the closure of the military prison within one year. He even bragged about it in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. Yet so weak is Obama’s leadership that even his executive orders go unfulfilled.

That Obama failed to deliver on these promises is bad enough; that many were made with no intention of being kept is far worse.

In a speech after the Minnesota primary, Obama actually claimed that:

“I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children… this was the moment that the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Imagine the kind of gall it takes to promise that your ascendency to high political office will stop the rise of the oceans.

It’s the sort of thing that an ancient Egyptian Pharaoh might have said with a straight face. That we allowed it of a 21st Century Presidential candidate boggles the mind.

As a candidate, Barack Obama was singularly capable of inspiring hope in Americans. But time and again, Americans’ hopes have been dashed.

Americans have watched as 2008’s campaign of hope and change devolved into 2012’s campaign of desperation, marked by embarrassing ads about big bird and comparing voting for Obama to a girl losing her virginity.

The last months of the campaign have seen a series of announcements that play off of the hopes of millions of still-struggling Americans, but will result in more of the disappointment that we’ve become accustomed to over the last four years.

In June, Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals memo, an election year maneuver that exacerbates our immigration crisis by incentivizing further illegal immigration.

In August, Obama promoted a bill offering refinancing to struggling homeowners that he knew was destined to fail.

Just last week, Obama announced plans for a new “Secretary of Business” in a last-ditch effort to associate his administration with economic growth.

Obama campaigned in poetry, governed in prose, and is running for reelection in deceitful advertising copy.

This time, Americans aren’t buying it.

David Laska is Communications Director of the New York State Republican Party.